Disputation and The Straight Dope Message Board

[MrDibble]

I’ll gladly give up multiline responses in exchange for a ban on scientific racism.

Otherwise, naah. You want pithy responses? Make pithy original posts.

[Jackmannii]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I’ve made a list of opinions I think should be off-limits

Maybe this isn’t the place to hear what you consider to be verboten opinions. But think about how that list would look as a boxed warning atop every forum page, and how it would affect “disputation” on the Dope.

I find Holocaust denial and antivaxer ideology (to name two viewpoints) to be loathsomely offensive. Having them brought up every once in awhile is useful as they are so readily dismantled by facts. It can even be done in a civil (not necessarily respectful) fashion without resorting to ad hominems.

Pearl-clutching at the very thought of having one’s beliefs/values challenged is as detrimental to good debate as pointlessly nasty slanging matches.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

In reality, I think the list is much longer than that.

(FTR, this was not about your list or posts specifically, but was the overall sense from multiple people posting in these threads.)

Yeah, but you said you thought some of them were widely accepted. I think there’s a very long list of views that are not very widely accepted that could be off limits.

Jack, there doesn’t need to be a list, doesn’t need to be a boxed warning. If Holocaust deniers got banned without a warning, that’s a fine thing for the board.

The idea that it’s “useful” to have them brought up is not self-evident. On the contrary, I think it’s a pretty thoroughly disproven concept.

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Yeah, but you said you thought some of them were widely accepted. I think there’s a very long list of views that are not very widely accepted that could be off limits.

Not sure what you’re saying here. Even if you have a long list of not very widely accepted views to make off-limits, that doesn’t mean there aren’t also a lot of views which are much more widely accepted that many of the more vocal posters would like to be off-limits.

In terms of lists, it’s hard to pin down exactly, because there’s too much nuance to a lot of these views. As a basic example, many people want “racism” and “misogyny” banned, but exactly what passes for racism and misogyny is subject to dispute and many views which are shared by broad swaths of the public are considered on this board to be racism and misogyny. And so on for other topics.

[octopus]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

I think you have your answer, in the responses to this and related threads. ISTM that a solid majority of (the vocal elements of) this board has taken the position that they will only respectfully tolerate disagreement with them as long as you don’t cross a line of their own choosing. Would nominally like to discuss other ideologies, but only as long as they get to define those ideologies to include only elements that they don’t find offensive. And many of the positions which are so odious that they’re not worthy of discussing are accepted to one degree or another by a pretty high percentage of the public.

I don’t think this was true of the SDMB in its early years, but that’s where it is now. This is partially about society at large, but also about the changing composition of the MB, which in becoming increasingly monolithic has thereby become more intolerant. (As I’ve posted elsewhere, I also think the SD administration, in attempting to placate this attitude, has only created further demands and a greater sense of entitlement.)

I don’t see a way around this, at this point. The membership of the board is what it is. Attempting to placate the (most vocal of the) membership will exacerbate the current trend, but leaving the current membership unhappy and in some cases riled up is also a tough sell.

Best of luck …

That’s about right.

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

Keep in mind that we’re talking about things like Holocaust denial and pro-pedophilia stuff. Is it the “black people are genetically inferior to white people” that is accepted “a pretty high percentage of the public”, or something else?

Yeah, I make no bones about wanting to limit the topics of discourse. In the same way that I’m happy to go to an ice cream shop with dozens of flavors, as long as those flavors don’t include Hooks 'n Worms, or Dropsy Surprise. Refusing to indulge those flavors doesn’t mean I only want vanilla.

Calling all differences between groups racist or sexist or bigoted is not a factual statement. That already happens on this board as a tactic to shout down and demean posters and it’s not an honest tactic. That said, if the powers that be want to restrict topics or proclaim a particular opinion as a fact then that is the prerogative of the owners and their proxies to do so.

[ASL_v2.0]

@octopus

Calling all differences between groups racist or sexist or bigoted is not a factual statement. That already happens on this board as a tactic to shout down and demean posters and it’s not an honest tactic. That said, if the powers that be want to restrict topics or proclaim a particular opinion as a fact then that is the prerogative of the owners and their proxies to do so.

Without mentioning the post or the poster that led me there, I not too long proposed a sort of “solution” to this problem in the pit. It’s in the spirit of allowing all ideas to be expressed and discussed, but not letting this place become a “Nazis in the basement” kind of bar.

The idea would be that there are certain… call them “high scrutiny” topics. Topics which may be discussed but, as the name suggests, only under greater than normal scrutiny and with certain impositions made on those advancing them. Namely, that if you put forward certain positions, and you confirm the sincerity of your position (otherwise, you’d be admitting to trolling), then you are locked in a thread on the appropriate forum, and you can only post in that one thread on that one topic until such time as the moderators agree that you have either (a) sufficiently made your case and responded to counter-arguments in a way that withstands scrutiny (ie: you’ve come out making your case with something like a preponderance of the evidence in your favor) or (b) you admit that you have failed to make your case sufficiently. That doesn’t mean you have to recant, but it means that you have to acknowledge that you have failed to present sufficient evidence as to be minimally convincing.

With that done, you would then be free to post elsewhere, perhaps even about the thing you got the “high scrutiny” treatment for if you made your case sufficiently.

Otherwise… well, I guess anyone can be a 9/11-truther once, but good luck doing it in two threads at the same time.

Examples of such “high scrutiny” positions might include those that include or advance:

-9/11 trutherism
-Moon Landing conspiracies (ie: “We didn’t land on the moon!”)
-Birtherism
-White Genocide Hypothesis
-Race X is objectively better than race Y
-Holocaust denial (or minimization)
-New World Order/Deep State/QAnon/Illuminati/“Free Masons run the country!” (take your pick)
-Men/Women/Trans/Intersex/Whites/Purples/etc. are more likely to do universally recognized as bad thing X and so we should preemptively strip them of basic civil rights and liberties.

And so on.

As to what exactly makes the list, how vague or how specific the wording of the list should be, and who gets to make the call that a poster has wandered into “list” territory, well… that’d be for the moderators to say, of course! And there could always be discussion, in this very forum, on whether or not the community thinks a topic should be “added to the list” or if maybe the board was a little hasty in “listing it.” Just like there is discussion now about various notes and warnings.

The point is, no topic that is currently permitted under the rules would be barred from discussion, but those advancing certain fringe or possibly racist theories would be forced to restrict their commentary to a single topic, rather than be free to spew a bunch of very polite, very civil, but fundamentally hateful or downright nonsensical BS all over the place.

Anyway, that’s just a thought.

[octopus]

@ASL_v2.0

Without mentioning the post or the poster that led me there, I not too long proposed a sort of “solution” to this problem in the pit. It’s in the spirit of allowing all ideas to be expressed and discussed, but not letting this place become a “Nazis in the basement” kind of bar.

The idea would be that there are certain… call them “high scrutiny” topics. Topics which may be discussed but, as the name suggests, only under greater than normal scrutiny and with certain impositions made on those advancing them. Namely, that if you put forward certain positions, and you confirm the sincerity of your position (otherwise, you’d be admitting to trolling), then you are locked in a thread on the appropriate forum, and you can only post in that one thread on that one topic until such time as the moderators agree that you have either (a) sufficiently made your case and responded to counter-arguments in a way that withstands scrutiny (ie: you’ve come out making your case with something like a preponderance of the evidence in your favor) or (b) you admit that you have failed to make your case sufficiently. That doesn’t mean you have to recant, but it means that you have to acknowledge that you have failed to present sufficient evidence as to be minimally convincing.

With that done, you would then be free to post elsewhere, perhaps even about the thing you got the “high scrutiny” treatment for if you made your case sufficiently.

Otherwise… well, I guess anyone can be a 9/11-truther once, but good luck doing it in two threads at the same time.

Examples of such “high scrutiny” positions might include those that include or advance:

-9/11 trutherism
-Moon Landing conspiracies (ie: “We didn’t land on the moon!”)
-Birtherism
-White Genocide Hypothesis
-Race X is objectively better than race Y
-Holocaust denial (or minimization)
-New World Order/Deep State/QAnon/Illuminati/“Free Masons run the country!” (take your pick)
-Men/Women/Trans/Intersex/Whites/Purples/etc. are more likely to do universally recognized as bad thing X and so we should preemptively strip them of basic civil rights and liberties.

And so on.

As to what exactly makes the list, how vague or how specific the wording of the list should be, and who gets to make the call that a poster has wandered into “list” territory, well… that’d be for the moderators to say, of course! And there could always be discussion, in this very forum, on whether or not the community thinks a topic should be “added to the list” or if maybe the board was a little hasty in “listing it.” Just like there is discussion now about various notes and warnings.

The point is, no topic that is currently permitted under the rules would be barred from discussion, but those advancing certain fringe or possibly racist theories would be forced to restrict their commentary to a single topic, rather than be free to spew a bunch of very polite, very civil, but fundamentally hateful or downright nonsensical BS all over the place.

Anyway, that’s just a thought.

Sounds ridiculous to have to debate wage gap in quarantine.

[ASL_v2.0]

@octopus

Sounds ridiculous to have to debate wage gap in quarantine.

skims proposed preliminary list

Uh, I don’t see that on there. But, again, whether or not it would actually make the list, if such a list is adopted, wouldn’t be up to me, so…?

[Jragon]

misclick

[Jragon]

@tricoteuse

I know I stormed out in the other thread but I got to thinking maybe I was too harsh. I saw later on that the poster I was steamed up about did get warned for his post and things seemed to have settle down so I thought I’d see what was going on in the aftermath of all of it.

Firstly, I haven’t been here that long so I don’t know squat about how this board used to be twenty years ago or ten or five or even one. I can only judge it by how it is now, and how people post now, not how the “good old days” might have been.

Trying to blame everything on current American culture and hinting that everyone who is a member here is all equally to blame seems like a passive-aggressive attempt to pass the buck instead of taking a long hard look at what isn’t working and why.

Everyone here makes a big deal out of how the main rule is “don’t be a jerk.” That means when people act like jerks, the moderators have to STOP them being jerks. Regular posters can’t do anything. If you tell someone to stop acting a certain way, you’re junior modding. If you call someone a jerk anywhere but the pit, you get in trouble for insulting another poster. If you ask people to stay on topic you get told you dn’t get to dictate how people respond to your thread. All you need is one problem poster who thinks “screw you, you’re not the boss of me!” and the thread gets overrun.

The moderators DO have that power, but don’t always use it. As a result, the posters who are being jerks keep being jerks, other posters are helpless to stop them, so the only ones left in the threads are the jerks and the posters who can’t help challenging them for whatever reasons.

You can post all the fluffy sunshine and butterflies feel-good stuff you want, and daydream about the good old days all you want, but that’s not going to accomplish anything. Those days are over. This is now. The members you have now are what you have to work with.

If you want to make the board a more civil and welcoming place, DO something! It has to start with recruiting moderators who are willing to call being a jerk what it is and stop it before it gets out of hand. And let the moderators use their discretion to do their jobs. Mods who abuse their power get kicked out. If the problem is too many tedious little conflicting rules that the “rules lawyers” can pick apart for loopholes, ditch all the rules and come up with a few clear ones that allow for leeway in interpretation.

It really does look like you’re trying to blame the membership for not being as kind and welcoming as you think they should be. Guess what, trying to guilt them into changing the board on their own won’t work. Look at any workplace where the boss won’t stand by their employees and see how cheerful and productive they are. Look at a group of kids where the teacher’s pet or the class bully is allowed to do whatever they want and tell them to be more accepting and patient. Think about a fine-dining restaurant where someone is yelling and throwing food and making a ruckus but the manager won’t tell them to leave, and expect the other guests to enjoy their meals.

Change at the bottom won’t come without change at the top.

TBH, this is a much better version of what I intended in this thread I think got misinterpreted due to my own poor writing (and was entirely too long).

What I was trying to point out/solve in that thread is that moderators don’t moderate things if they’re not clear cut slurs and things like that, but will mod people who break “decorum” and call out the “you’re not the boss of me” posters who hide behind these rules in no uncertain terms. Part of my “pit being toxic” section was that not only do the existence of those rules shield the people presenting the problem, it also adds additional overhead towards addressing the problem, because you have to take it to the put and take the effort to make a new thread or post in a megathread rather than just addressing the tenor of the argument as part of the debate.

My desire isn’t to have threads full of cursing at other posters and callout threads everywhere, it was the fact that if the mods aren’t going to police this stuff, we should at least be able to self-police by calling things what they are, and to be honest even if the mods will police it some redundancy is nice anyway.

[El_Kabong]

@TubaDiva

The SDMB reflects our society. Today we are in an increasingly tribal, unceasingly warring culture. People don’t discuss or debate in good faith, they decry, they demand, they assault. On the scorched fields of discourse they relentlessly search for targets to attack and destroy. Much of this is played out on the board, and it makes for hard going.

There is much that needs adjusting here. Everyone needs to be less judgmental, less aggressive, less inclined to condemn. There needs to be genuine social discourse. The entire idea about this place to begin with was that this would be a place where we could talk about damn near everything. More and more it’s a place where we can’t talk about anything.

That’s messed up and we’re all to blame. We own it all; all the goodness in places and all the toxic spots too. It belongs to all of us. It’s the house we all built a post at a time. And 22 millions posts later, here we are.

I hear that and promise to do my best. For example, an elderly lady wearing a MAGA hat walked into my place of work today, and I made no attempt to smack it off her head. I will do all I can to treat with the same deference people here who I disagree with politically. Well, try, anyway. Baby steps.

[tricoteuse]

@Jragon

TBH, this is a much better version of what I intended in this thread I think got misinterpreted due to my own poor writing (and was entirely too long).

What I was trying to point out/solve in that thread is that moderators don’t moderate things if they’re not clear cut slurs and things like that, but will mod people who break “decorum” and call out the “you’re not the boss of me” posters who hide behind these rules in no uncertain terms. Part of my “pit being toxic” section was that not only do the existence of those rules shield the people presenting the problem, it also adds additional overhead towards addressing the problem, because you have to take it to the put and take the effort to make a new thread or post in a megathread rather than just addressing the tenor of the argument as part of the debate.

My desire isn’t to have threads full of cursing at other posters and callout threads everywhere, it was the fact that if the mods aren’t going to police this stuff, we should at least be able to self-police by calling things what they are, and to be honest even if the mods will police it some redundancy is nice anyway.

I understood what you were getting at in that thread and it was part of what got me pondering on what the biggest problems around here were, so don’t worry about being unclear.

If I was Queen of the Messageboard the pit is one of the places I’d start with some serious rules revision.

First of all, I think the pit would wind up being more bitching about current events and personal problems than poster vs. poster fights if posters were allowed to POLITELY address jerkishness in any thread.

I’d still allow posters to call each other out but bar the mention of mental or physical illness as insults. No insults based on gender or political affiliation. Definitely not against being LGBT or nonwhite although that’s probably covered under hate speech. There are still plenty of good insults out there that work for everone!

[octopus]

@Jragon

TBH, this is a much better version of what I intended in this thread I think got misinterpreted due to my own poor writing (and was entirely too long).

What I was trying to point out/solve in that thread is that moderators don’t moderate things if they’re not clear cut slurs and things like that, but will mod people who break “decorum” and call out the “you’re not the boss of me” posters who hide behind these rules in no uncertain terms. Part of my “pit being toxic” section was that not only do the existence of those rules shield the people presenting the problem, it also adds additional overhead towards addressing the problem, because you have to take it to the put and take the effort to make a new thread or post in a megathread rather than just addressing the tenor of the argument as part of the debate.

My desire isn’t to have threads full of cursing at other posters and callout threads everywhere, it was the fact that if the mods aren’t going to police this stuff, we should at least be able to self-police by calling things what they are, and to be honest even if the mods will police it some redundancy is nice anyway.

The mods supposedly police the rules of the board. Not the rules that posters wish were the rules. It should be clear and not difficult. Now if the board wants to act in a de facto by popular demand fashion then have the integrity to clearly state that.

[D_Anconia]

@tricoteuse

First of all, I think the pit would wind up being more bitching about current events and personal problems than poster vs. poster fights if posters were allowed to POLITELY address jerkishness in any thread.

Posters are already allowed to bitch about current events and personal problems in other forums. Why would it be desirable to turn the Pit into more of that?

[Translucent_Daydream]

I think that the mods know what they have to do. I question whether they have the resolve/stones to do it or not. Thats up to them and how much they care for the board. A hands off approach sometimes is like letting the dog drive the car. Maybe its best to let it die a slow death and not change anything, or they could help it float back up by clamping down on some of the line-walkers.

ETA: Sometimes, I think that people feel its better to do nothing instead of doing something when things are going wrong and they aren’t sure if doing “something” can make it better.

I have a lot of people working for me, and a lot of them fuck up. I never fire someone that was trying to fix something and screws up vs the person that has a wait and see attitude. I mean “doing something” shows you care.

[Jragon]

@octopus

The mods supposedly police the rules of the board. Not the rules that posters wish were the rules. It should be clear and not difficult. Now if the board wants to act in a de facto by popular demand fashion then have the integrity to clearly state that.

nah fam i think the board should clamp down on trolly bullshit and ban people who post heinous bigoted shit even if they dont technically use the big naughty words even if its not ~pOpUlAr DeMaNd~ and also be able to tell posters who do it to fuck off and point out theyre being bigoted pieces of shit so people reading know the heinous dogwhistly history of the sorts of arguments theyre making hth

[octopus]

@Jragon

nah fam i think the board should clamp down on trolly bullshit and ban people who post heinous bigoted shit even if they dont technically use the big naughty words even if its not ~pOpUlAr DeMaNd~ and also be able to tell posters who do it to fuck off and point out theyre being bigoted pieces of shit so people reading know the heinous dogwhistly history of the sorts of arguments theyre making hth

No. It doesn’t. Because many, many times people call stuff bigoted in some form or another merely to discredit the one making an argument. But then again, when have words meant what they mean?

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@octopus

No. It doesn’t. Because many, many times people call stuff bigoted in some form or another merely to discredit the one making an argument. But then again, when have words meant what they mean?

I don’t think there’s a way to keep octopus happy and keep me happy. And that extends to a lot of people. The way the board has gone has catered a lot more toward octopus etc. They’ll keep making the same sort of arguments. I hope the board admin decides to be done with them.

[octopus]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I don’t think there’s a way to keep octopus happy and keep me happy. And that extends to a lot of people. The way the board has gone has catered a lot more toward octopus etc. They’ll keep making the same sort of arguments. I hope the board admin decides to be done with them.

You don’t know what keeps me happy even though I’ve written it clearly. Set the parameters and enforce them without bias and without popular opinion polls. If you explicitly clarify a rule don’t do the exact opposite based on popular pressure.

If Great Debates and Elections are much more tightly constrained that’s fine by me as long as the constraints are clear. Sorry that I don’t buy into moderation by popular demand or exploitation of majority social pressure as a desirable way of running things. If you were posting on a 95% conservative dominated board I can guarantee you wouldn’t be advocating for popular pressure having influence.

[D_Anconia]

@Left_Hand_of_Dorkness

I don’t think there’s a way to keep octopus happy and keep me happy. And that extends to a lot of people. The way the board has gone has catered a lot more toward octopus etc. They’ll keep making the same sort of arguments. I hope the board admin decides to be done with them.

And the board admin should lean towards your view why, exactly?